Posts tagged with: George Orwell

Last weekend the second film based on the immensely popular Hunger Games series of books, Catching Fire, opened in theaters. One interesting way to view the world of Panem, Suzanne Collins’ totalitarian society that serves as the setting for the drama, is as a synthesis of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In Catching Fire, Collins suggests that whether a tyranny exercises its dominion through pleasure or oppression, under the right circumstances conscience will inevitably spur some to rise up for the sake of the freedom that God demands from us all.

In the twelve districts of Panem, the residents live in oppressive circumstances. Peacekeepers patrol the streets, enforcing the rule of the Capitol. The reader (or viewer, as the case may be) quickly discovers that District 12, Katniss’s home, has had life easy compared to the others. She and Peeta must go on a victors’ tour throughout Panem after winning the previous year’s Hunger Games. There they encounter not only violent, police-state governance, but when they return they find that District 12 has been made to conform to the same standard. The new head Peacekeeper seeks to make an example out of Gale, and only relents (after at least forty lashes) when Katniss, Haymitch, and Peeta intervene, using the little status they have as Hunger Games celebrities.(more…)

There is nothing simple about Bl. John Paul II’s writings, and yet, his work collectively called the Theology of the Body offers a remarkable chance to reflect on the unique creation that is man. In modern culture, we see humanity reduced to a collection of parts (a lung to transplant, a womb to be rented) or as an instrument to be used (for lust or for slavery.) The human body has become “treachery”, as George Orwell notes in 1984, not a beautifully rendered creation. John Paul II:

There is a deep connection between the mystery of creation, as a gift springing from love, and that beatifying “beginning” of the existence of man as male and female, in the whole truth of their body and their sex, which is the pure and simple truth of communion between persons. When the first man exclaimed, at the sight of the woman: “This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Gn 2:23), he merely affirmed the human identity of both. Exclaiming in this way, he seems to say: here is a body that expresses the person!(more…)

“There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word– Man” ― George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are clearly at a point where we are all to be treated as criminals. Why? Because it’s politically incorrect to name the actual criminals. If a terrorist is fueled by a fundamentalist vision of his religion, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, we are told that their radical roots are “mysterious” or religion wasn’t even a factor in their choice to bomb the Boston marathon. If we, as a society, are unable to pin down what is behind terrorism, then everyone becomes suspect. (more…)

On The Freeman, PowerBlog contributor Bruce Edward Walker marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and the essay “The Initiates” published a decade later in The God that Failed. As Walker notes, “it’s a convenient opportunity to revisit both works as a reminder of what awaits all democratic societies eager to abandon liberties for the sake of utopian ideologies.” Koestler’s Noon, he says, is where the author is at the height of his powers “capturing the mindset of the collectivist fantasy in order to completely dispel its flawed precepts.” Walker also reminds us that class struggle leads to a dead end:

What differentiates Koestler’s work from other highly lauded literary attacks on collectivism by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Stanislaw Lem is perspective. Whereas the other writers projected the results of communism in novels depicting dystopian futures—Lem by necessity since he was living in Soviet-controlled Poland; Orwell and Huxley by choice—Koestler, recognizing the Soviet Central Committee’s initiatives to reconstruct all history as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, documented what had already occurred under Stalin’s reign of terror during a decade of famine, the Great Purge, and the Moscow show trials. While the famines and purges resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Soviets, the show trials are characterized as an absurd travesty of Kafkaesque proportions in which Soviet apparatchiks obtained public confessions from old-guard Bolsheviks on trumped-up charges, resulting in the coerced “confessions” of counterrevolutionary activities and subsequent executions.

Here’s Orwell on Koestler:

The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian. In 1937 Koestler already knew this, but did not feel free to say so.